Maroon 5 will release their new album, Love is Like, on Aug. 15. For some of the album, the band decided to forgo working with outside writers and producers in favor of writing songs themselves, just as they did early in their career. The decision was sparked by the first song Adam Levine wrote for the project: “Priceless.”
“The album started with Adam sending us a voice memo of a song that he had sat down and written, just him and a guitar,” guitarist James Valentine tells ABC Audio. “And it was really cool, because that’s the way our songs used to come about back in the day. And it had been a while since I think Adam had felt connected to writing. And he just sat down, and came up with this great song.”
That marked a welcome change for the band, says James.
“We were all really excited, because we had a run where we were working with a lot of really amazing, talented producers and songwriters,” he says. “And that yielded some amazing songs. But in the beginning, it was just the five of us in a room, sort of writing these songs together. So starting [this] album, we sort of started with that old approach.”
But eventually, James says, they “sort of fell back into the way that we’ve been working over the last few years, where we worked with some amazing producers.”
Still, he notes, “At the heart of the album, and I think the first five tracks, they were kind of constructed in more of that old-school sort of way, which was really fun to do, to go back to that.”
Maroon 5 will launch a tour in support of Love is Like in October.
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